Your buyer's research used to take 12 weeks. Now it takes 4 minutes. Your buyer’s research used to take twelve weeks. Now it takes four minutes (!). That was the first slide Keith Holloway and I put up in our webinar, “The AI Enabled Buyer”, and it’s the theme that we unpacked and made actionable. A CFO buying expense software in 2023 spent three months comparing eight vendors. The same CFO today opens ChatGPT, asks one good question, and gets back five names with a comparison table before the coffee’s done.
Buyer Enablement for Content Teams: The Shift That Changes What You Create I’ve been building sales enablement tools for years, so I feel qualified to say this: most “sales enablement content” is built for the wrong person. It’s built for the sales rep. Battlecards they reference before calls. Talk tracks they memorize. Internal training docs they skim during onboarding. Decks they present in demos. All useful. All necessary. All completely useless when the rep leaves the room and the buyer has to sell the deal internally.
Buyer Enablement in the Age of AI: How Not to Fall Behind I’m going to be honest with you. I’m still figuring this out. Not in a “nobody knows anything” way. In a “the ground is shifting under our feet and the teams that figure it out first will have a massive advantage” way. I’ve been building content management tools for B2B teams for years, and what I’m seeing right now is the biggest shift since we moved from printed collateral to digital.
The Content Gap in the B2B Buying Process There’s a stat that gets cited in every B2B content marketing article: “buyers are X% through the process before they talk to sales.” You’ve seen it. The number changes depending on who’s publishing it. Gartner says 67%. Forrester says 75%. The point is always the same: buyers are doing a lot of research on their own. But nobody talks about this part. If buyers are doing all this self-directed research, then the content they find during that research IS your sales process.
Why Your Best Content Never Reaches Your Buyer You spent two weeks on that case study. Your designer made it beautiful. Your customer gave you a quote with real numbers. It’s genuinely good. Six months later, exactly three people have read it. Your marketing manager, your CEO (who skimmed it), and one sales rep who remembered it existed because they were on the call when the customer agreed to participate. That case study could have unblocked a dozen deals.
Your Buyer Champion Can't Sell Without the Right Content Here’s something that should keep you up at night: your best deal is being sold right now by someone who doesn’t work for you. Your buyer champion. The person inside the account who actually believes in your product and is trying to convince their boss, their boss’s boss, the CFO, legal, IT, and whoever else showed up uninvited to the review meeting. And they’re doing it with… what exactly? That PDF you emailed three weeks ago?